Top from left, Jayne Houdyshell, Lauren Klein and Arian Moayed, and bottom, from left, Reed Birney, Sarah Steele and Cassie Beck — on David Zinn’s set — in “The Humans.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Doing life twice sounds like the only thing worse than doing it once,” says the beleaguered paterfamilias of “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s piercingly funny, bruisingly sad comedy-drama about an American family teetering on the edge of the abyss.

The title may sound generic, but there’s nothing blurry about Mr. Karam’s scorching drama, which opened on Broadway on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Drawn in subtle but indelible strokes, Mr. Karam’s play might almost qualify as deep-delving reportage, so clearly does it illuminate the current, tremor-ridden landscape of contemporary America.

The finest new play of the Broadway season so far — by a long shot — Mr. Karam’s drama has been beautifully transferred from Off Broadway, where it was presented by the Roundabout Theater Companylast fall, with the production’s prized virtues intact: a peerless cast, whose members all inhabit their characters as if they’ve been living in their itchy skins forever; direction from Joe Mantello that stealthily navigates the play’s delicate shifts, from witty domestic comedy to painful conflict, and from there to something resembling a goose-pimply chiller; and a set, designed by David Zinn, that perfectly captures the unsettled atmosphere the writing so deftly establishes.

The sturdy bones of the play are familiar: On one level, it is a classic tale of a fractious family gathering, seasoned with squabbles over those topics that we are all advised to avoid, and rarely do, like money, religion, class and what the kids are doing wrong with their lives. The play takes place in a prewar apartment in Chinatown, where three generations of the Blake family are assembling for Thanksgiving dinner.

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Excerpt: ‘The Humans’

A scene from Stephen Karam’s play, on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater.

Newly rented and still awaiting delivery of the furniture, the apartment is home to Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend, Richard (Arian Moayed), who proudly point out its spaciousness — or its comparative spaciousness, anyway. Any New York apartment that includes a spiral staircase pretty much qualifies as spacious, although, as Brigid’s mother and father cannot help noting, the bottom half is a windowless basement.

For that matter, upstairs the only windows look out at what Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), Brigid’s mother, describes as “an alley full of cigarette butts.” Brigid corrects her, with cutting exasperation: “It’s an interior courtyard.”

Brigid’s father, Erik (Reed Birney) — the fellow who doesn’t see another turn on life’s carousel as a happy prospect — is more encouraging, although he also seems preoccupied. Deirdre and Erik have driven in from Scranton, Pa., bringing along Erik’s mother, called Momo (Lauren Klein), who is in a wheelchair and suffering from dementia. Although everyone showers tender care on her, Momo is having one of her “bad days,” as Erik puts it, only rousing from her near-slumber to mutter incomprehensibly. (Ms. Klein gives a remarkable performance, admirably free of showboating or sentiment.) Nor is she the only family member in ill health: Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), has ulcerative colitis.

An atmosphere of slightly forced gaiety barely covers the sense of peril that subtly gathers in the dining room as we learn more about the pressures bearing down upon the family. Aimee’s ill health has cost her job at a law firm. Brigid, an aspiring composer, is working two bartending jobs as she faces piles of student debt. After toiling for 28 years in various capacities at a private school, Erik is facing uncertain prospects, too. His wife, an office manager, now answers to bosses decades younger than she is, who make much more money.

These trials may sound familiar to anyone reading the headlines these days; after all, the universal can only be found in the specific. The Blakes are drawn in rich detail — the family members sing traditional Irish songs and even have their own eccentric Thanksgiving traditions — but they are also emblematic of the embattled middle classes, who have seen the bright expectations of the American dream fraying in the harsh headwinds of economic stagnation.

Photo

From left, Cassie Beck, Arian Moayed, Reed Birney, Jayne Houdyshell, Lauren Klein and Sarah Steele in Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” which opened Thursday at the Helen Hayes.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

This particular family is embodied by an ensemble cast as fine as any seen on Broadway (or off) in recent seasons, New York theater veterans offering a welcome riposte to the now-entrenched routine of corralling TV and movie stars for plays old and new.

I have written many times of Mr. Birney’s excellence, but his performance here moved me so deeply I find myself reaching for new superlatives. Well, I’ll skip those careworn things and merely say that without for a moment distorting the delicate emotional textures of the writing, he draws a heart-rending portrait of a loving husband, father and son slowly withering inside, in a state of bemused bewilderment at the unforeseen turns his life has taken.

Ms. Houdyshell has received her share of hosannas from me, too, and deserves another bushel-ful for her exquisitely funny Deirdre. A modest woman of great heart and spirit, Deirdre, perhaps more than any other member of the family, has weathered the storms she and her husband have endured with a stolid equanimity, in part because she still trusts in the good Lord to see them through.

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No less fine are Ms. Steele as the antsy Brigid, who cannot keep a damper on her simmering differences with her mother, and Ms. Beck, whose Aimee, still reeling from the loss of her longtime girlfriend, tries to brush off her depression with self-mocking humor. And while his role is comparatively small, Mr. Moayed’s fine contribution to the ensemble should not be overlooked, as Richard plays the mediator in the conflicts.

With or without those ominous suggestions that the American family as we know it is under existential threat, “The Humans” is a major discovery, a play as empathetic as it is clear-minded, as entertaining as it is honest. For all the darkness at its core — a darkness made literal in its ghostly conclusion — a bright light shines forth from it, the blazing luminescence of collective artistic achievement.

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Friday with a theater review of “The Humans,” at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan, reversed the identities of two actors. Lauren Klein is in a wheelchair in a doorway, with Arian Moayed behind her.

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